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Comment by hellojohnbuck

20 hours ago

thanks adam

Hey John, I'm just curious how people find these comments about "would be nice if X saw this" on HN. I don't think there's any pinging behavior. Did somebody message you? Did you just happen to read it? Do you have an eldritch curse that summons you when called by name?

  • I use f5bot.com, which monitors HN, Reddit, and Lobsters. (I have no connection to f5bot except being a happy user.)

  • I've seen Ken Shirriff do this. You mention him and suddenly he's there.

    • hi! :-) As I commented elsewhere, f5bot.com is a nice, free tool to monitor HN

  • Once upon a time there was a guy who went by Kibo who would search Usenet feeds for posts mentioning his username and reply to them...

    • I bet Musk hacked something together (or has a column in TweetDeck if that's still around) that continuously searches for mentions. I wonder if there's a tool like that that covers more of the internet, although the primary users would only be famous people and/or their agents / social media staff.

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  • From what I've seen, sometimes people see that their blog post got a lot of referral traffic from Hacker News and they come have a look to see where it came from.

  • Not who you're asking for, but generally I think it's just a case of the author also being an HN regular. Although, I suppose you could set up some Google Alerts for mentions of your blog posts.